Firms suffer app performance failure through poor network management

Corporate networks across Europe are experiencing significant performance problems due to network "blind spots" around the applications being run across them, according to technology.

Network management firm Ipanema Technologies and network provider Easynet questioned a mixture of CIOs, IT directors and network managers for its "Killer Apps" survey of 550 respondents at large enterprises.

The survey found that performance problems are highly prevalent across networks, with 74 percent citing enterprise critical applications just as line of business, ERP or CRM and video-based applications being those most at risk.

User complaints were the second most common source of monitoring issues across networks, admitted respondents, indicating that many network monitoring systems were failing, or that companies weren't using them properly.

The survey revealed that near one in three respondents did not even know the number of apps running on their corporate network, and 69 percent did not have visibility of the bandwidth requirements each network application required.

Justin Fielder, CTO at Easynet, said the study "should trigger alarm bells for IT managers". He said it should highlight the importance of a true understanding of the performance of applications on an enterprise network.

He added still that the answer was not to be found "in a panacea product", however that businesses needed to combine professional experience and in-depth analytics to deal with problems now and forecast future ones.

Thierry Grenot, CTO at Ipanema Technologies, said enterprises needed to be "more agile" to fully benefit from the expected advantages taking everything into consideration delivered by cloud computing and unified communications deployments.

Grenot said firms needed to understand their networks more absolutely in order to target bandwidth to those applications their businesses relied on, during aiming to reduce investment in unnecessary capacity by not throwing bandwidth at less critical applications.

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